Glynn slammed down his emptied glass and expelled a flabby yawn.
‘Dear oh dear,’ Antonia chimed, ‘the Professor needs another drink,’ although another drink was patently the last thing the Professor needed. ‘Here,’ she said picking up her handbag, ‘why don’t I go to the bar this time? I’m sure it must be my round.’
Glynn blinked gratefully and eyed her handbag gluttonously, as if he might like to wolf the contents down. It was Antonia who got him started on the spirits that night, avenging herself with the perfect crime. There is always a price.
‘I think she’s trying to kill him,’ Guinevere said in wonderment when Antonia left the table. ‘I think the woman is actually trying to kill him.’
‘There’s something going wrong with me,’ Aisling blurted. ‘It’s like everything I’m thinking is written in block capitals. I can’t switch off Caps Lock. My thoughts are all screaming. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Do you know what I mean?’ she asked a second time, clearly accustomed to being misunderstood, to having to go to great lengths to explain herself. She looked at our faces around the table. DO YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN?
We nodded, I, we, they. Those assembled at the table nodded, all except for Glynn, whose mind had wandered. It did kind of bother me that I knew what Aisling meant. A few months ago, I’d have drawn a blank.
‘Funny taste in my mouth,’ Glynn complained, and belched graphically. Anything to be the centre of attention.
‘Probably only a brain tumour,’ said Antonia, placing a tumbler of whiskey on the beer mat in front of him. A double, we silently noted.
‘Maybe you’re having a stroke,’ I offered.
‘Oh now,’ said Faye. ‘Enough of that.’
Guinevere didn’t open her mouth. She didn’t denounce Glynn’s whining, she, who had most to denounce. Why didn’t she slap him? Why did she leave the job fall to others instead? Grizzling Glynn complained steadily for the guts of an hour, as if setting us an endurance test. He muttered and murmured and mumbled, maundered and malingered and moaned. Oh Christ, there was no end to it. On and on it went. He was teething, or required burping, or a nappy change. I looked at his old freckled hand in disgust, watched it perform gestures of self-regard. The urinal fingers, the breast-sized palm. It was not a writerly hand. It wasn’t a lover’s hand either. ‘I’m finished as a novelist,’ he concluded bitterly, and nobody contradicted him.
‘Are we still here?’ Aisling asked. She seemed surprised. If she had briefly fallen asleep, I can’t say I’d noticed. She finished off her pint, knocking it back like water.
‘Why are you still sending those hateful letters to me?’ Glynn snarled at Antonia.
‘Because I hate you.’ She laughed. ‘Because I hate you.’ She laughed again.
‘Stupid bitch,’ he retaliated. We think that’s what he said. His speech was slurred, his eyes had glazed. He was listing over the table in a limp, boneless manner, his hands dangling by his side as if he’d lost the use of them, which for an awful moment we thought he had, until he batted Faye away when she tried to prop him up.
Glynn pushed the table back from his belly for the final act. For this, he needed an audience, though whether he could distinguish our individual forms in the blizzard of his whiskey blindness is debatable.
His demons were everywhere by then. There was more to it than a bad pint. They had stolen up without us noticing and had him rightly surrounded. No matter which way he turned, a leering head popped up, provoking one wincing grimace after another from the writer. Great was his torment. Glynn had never witnessed such ugliness in his life. Hideous was the word he used. ‘Hideous, hideous,’ he declared, yet he couldn’t tear his eyes from their disfigured faces either, couldn’t get his fill, now that they had finally revealed their foul selves to him. They’d been hiding behind books and doors for years, lurking at the bottom of pint glasses and whiskey bottles, but now his demons were sitting right there at the table with us, bold as brass, defiant as you like. I am going to keep this short.
By the looks of it, we were outnumbered. There was one beside me, one next to Aisling, and a whole rack of them lined up in the wings. They even had names. Moloch, Ezekiel, Belial, Glynn called them, pointing from one to the other. He paused for a moment to reflect. His wife hated him. His only child wouldn’t speak to him. He’d only gone and … he gestured in the direction of Guinevere and Antonia at this point. ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ he cried in anguish.
The demons leapt up and down in delight at that, monkeys in a cage. Glynn cursed them mercilessly in his best demonish. No better man for the job. He had recourse to the language of Milton and Dante, works with which he had forged a deep connection for all the wrong reasons, regarding them not as the moral allegories they patently were but as early examples of kitchen-sink realism.
‘Infernal Serpent,’ he hissed. ‘Arch-fiend, Chemos the Obscene, horrid king.’ I put my arm around Guinevere. It quickly degenerated into vile street argot, which was evidently fresher in his mind. He must have picked it up the night the knackers spat in his face beneath the statue of Thomas Moore. Still possessed a keen ear for the demotic, Glynn.
‘He’s right,’ Aisling exclaimed, looking urgently from one face to the next, nodding vigorously to canvass our support. ‘Listen to him: he knows what he’s talking about. He’s right.’
‘I’m fucking light-starved,’ Antonia was saying, ‘I’m fucking light-starved.’ Everyone was repeating everything twice. Or maybe I was hearing everything twice. What follows is my version of events, unexpurgated, after the master.
Up Glynn reared onto his hind legs. We too jumped to our feet. Then what? Then nothing. The five of us just stood around the table staring at him in alarm, waiting for instructions. ‘Do you mind?’ he asked, and we shuffled out of his way, biddable as sheep.
‘Go after him,’ Faye said in panic, ‘Go after him. We can’t leave him alone in that state.’
Glynn ploughed through the mill of students to the exit. Difficult, keeping up with him. It was quiet as a church out on the quad after the clamour of the Buttery. A large moon was rising over Botany Bay, the colour of the head of a pint. It seemed to possess no third dimension but was instead wafer thin, a communion host.
We were barely a few steps into the darkness when Aisling collapsed. I turned around to see her in a whimpering heap on the ground, a small whorl of trembling black fabric. Two tyre tracks of mascara scored her face as if something had mown her down. She gulped convulsively, sheer terror in her eyes, and pointed at the corner. ‘Look!’ she cried. ‘It’s here!’
Faye and Guinevere tried to pick her up, but she wouldn’t let them. ‘Look at it!’ she kept shrieking, thrusting her finger at the corner, but the corner was empty. There was nothing there. ‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ Antonia was chanting in the background, over and over like an unanswered phone. Glynn turned around and saw that he had lost his audience. We, like his gift, had abandoned him.
‘You,’ he said sharply.
I turned my head. ‘What?’
He muttered something under his breath, deliberately inaudible to force me to approach. He lured me around the corner and out of sight. ‘What?’ I said again.
‘That one. Your one.’
‘Guinevere?’
‘Yes, her.’ He laughed. ‘To think I thought she’d be one of those girls who look better with their clothes on than off.’
That did it. I took a run at him. He went down easy, not a bother. Nothing to it at all. I’d have straight out punched him only for my bad fist, so I shouldered him instead, and down the great writer went, face first, rigid, a statue toppling from its plinth, first slowly, then quickly, making a meaty, gristly sound upon impact with the cobbles.
He started laughing again once he got his wind back. I swung a good kick at his ribs. My foot connected not with bone but a dreary mass of fat. It was a disgusting sensation. I kicked him again to rid myself of it. He grunted. I didn’t feel any bett
er. And I didn’t feel any worse. I hated the fucker, hated him. I hope he is reading these words.
‘State of you,’ I pronounced in lofty judgement over the writer’s bent back and hawked a gullier just shy of his face.
He stopped laughing at that and raised his head to regard me, a smile of sorts smeared across his face. It was the hapless oafish grin of a simpleton – Glynn’s front tooth had shattered on a cobble. A quivering string of snot-clotted blood dangled from his nostril, elongating and contracting with the rhythm of his breath. ‘State of you,’ I said again, but he didn’t retaliate, just nodded in what for all the world looked to be agreement, then lowered his head onto the smooth cobbles again and closed his eyes to rest. I think that’s all he wanted. Another good reason to wallow in self-pity. Or confirmation that he was a prick. I no longer cared. It was nothing to me. By the time we passed that way again, maybe half an hour later, helping Aisling who was doing her best to walk to her parents’ car – still doing her best, in spite of everything, God be good to her – Glynn was already gone, having sought cover in some dark corner to lick his wounds, as any animal might.
30
Ní bheidh ár leithéid ann arís
You’ll never see the like of us again
This is the order in which I said goodbye to them:
Aisling was the first.
She was gone before we knew it. Gone before she knew it either. St Pat’s psychiatric hospital wasn’t half as intimidating an institution as you might expect, and the VHI covered it, her mother told me, adding that I was so kind to visit, that all of us had been so kind. Aisling had been given a room of her own once they took her off the suicide ward, where she had been kept for just two nights. In the scale of things, this was very good news, apparently. Her wing was filled with tranquillised women in slippers and dressing gowns, some still carrying their handbags about. They bore the muted, slightly sheepish demeanour of drinkers in an early house. ‘You should see the anorexics upstairs,’ Aisling confided, enunciating her words with a slow deliberateness that was neither characteristic nor necessary. ‘Mother of God.’
Antonia had spent a whole summer on that same ward two years previously, also being treated for clinical depression, which is where they got her started on exploring her creativity, painting at first, or ‘daubing’ as she called it, since she showed no aptitude. The writing suited her better. Though this information was offered with the best of intentions, I don’t see how Aisling could possibly have taken heart from it. Antonia was far from cured. Nor could I fathom how two individuals enduring such diverse symptoms could both be diagnosed with the same condition. But then, I wasn’t a doctor. Maybe Aisling wasn’t telling us the full story regarding what had gone wrong with her. Maybe she hadn’t been told the full story either.
It goes without saying that we barely knew her without the stark make-up, hardly recognised her in colour. We saw the few spots she’d been trying to conceal all year. They weren’t so bad, after all that, nowhere near as bad as I’d imagined. You’d scarcely notice them at all, really, but there was no right way of telling her, so I didn’t.
She was dressed in a pair of pink flannel pyjamas printed with teddy bears, a small cross-legged bundle on the bed, overcome with shyness. I felt like I’d come to babysit. Already she was changing, fading. She would not be herself much longer. The hospital would cure her of being Aisling. I missed her then, a crippling pang, though she was still right there beside me, sort of.
I gave her the Walkman bought from Giz in the end, and a Bowie compilation. The Ziggy years, not the Eno stuff, to be on the safe side. The girl had enough on her plate. She had told us once, in the early days before any of us really knew one another, that she didn’t believe anything bad could happen to you while you were listening to David Bowie. I dismissed the statement as foolish at the time, but the bad things she’d been referring to took place in her head, so her theory made sense, when you thought about it.
Her face lit up. ‘Guess what?’
‘What?’
‘Professor Glynn came in to see me today.’ A diffident trace of pride in her voice.
‘Really? That was decent of him.’
‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘He showed up with a bunch of flowers and a black eye.’ She nodded at her bedside locker. Amongst the Get Well Soon cards was a vase of white roses.
‘A black eye?’
She nodded. ‘And a broken tooth.’
I was surprised when she started to snigger. Surprised and relieved. A flash of her old self. Not gone yet, so. Not yet. Crippling, as I say.
He never saw his attackers. That’s the story he put about. At least four of them had set upon him from behind and kicked the tooth right out of his head. He’d gotten the better of them in the end, overpowering them with a left hook followed up by a sharp right, but that’s why he hadn’t been there to help when she’d collapsed, he wanted Aisling to know. He’d since made a speedy recovery and was right as rain, he had assured her bravely.
I shook my head. ‘Who could do such a thing to him?’
‘I know. Desperate.’
‘He told me that I was not to worry about all this,’ she added, gesturing at her surroundings. ‘He said it was just because I was young.’ We let that hang in the air, both of us hoping Glynn was right. Aisling lowered her head. She didn’t quite know what to do with her hands, now that she’d been stripped of her amulets. The pyjama sleeves were too long for her.
‘It was too much for me,’ she quietly admitted.
‘I know,’ I said, as gently as I could manage.
‘It got too much for me, Declan,’ she confessed again some minutes later, looking me anxiously in the eye as if I would think less of her for this admission.
‘I understand,’ I said, as softly as I was able.
*
Giz was next.
I’d seen him just the once since the Pushers Out vigilantes broke his window and nailed that funeral wreath to our door. He’d been evicted shortly afterwards. I was walking back into town after a visit to Aisling when there he was on the north quays ahead of me. The pneumatic white runners were gone, replaced by an old pair of builder’s boots. They must have been weighted down with steel caps, the way he hauled them along the pavement, as if they were magnetised to it. No shoelaces, never mind socks. His left arm dangled limply by his side, and his left leg dragged, slightly twisted.
I trailed along behind him at a discreet distance. We made slow progress past the courts. He collided over and over with the railings. It was a beautiful, such a beautiful morning in late April, one of those gifts the world unexpectedly bestows on you, warmth and light flooding into your bones after the siege of an Irish winter, so long, so hard, so damp, that you’d forgotten how good the sun felt, the giddying glory of it on your bare skin. The railings turned a right angle, and Giz veered around the corner with them, involuntarily by the signs of it. His good arm reached for the other side of the street, flailing towards it like a swimmer caught in an undertow. I crossed briskly at the lights, pretending that I hadn’t seen him, nor heard the moan of appeal that indicated that he had seen me.
I glanced back from the safety of the other side. The broad splendour of the Liffey, glinting and sparkling in the late spring sun, the smoky blue of the distant mountains. Giz was still floundering by the railings, a stalled clockwork toy, needing to be turned around and set on his way again. He was making the noise, the junkie noise, a wheedling mixture of pleading and complaint, the terrible wa-aa-aa that was general all over Dublin during the heroin years, ringing out of every side street and back lane. Wa-aa-aa; how it carried.
During the numb, tentative weeks following Aisling’s hospitalisation, small acts of localised kindness gained a new significance in the order of things. I finally left my bed in the dead of the night and went out to see if I could comfort the dog that had been howling away the year, lonely as a wolf. I wanted to feel like a better person.
I followed the howl down a lane se
parating two rows of back-to-back terraces. I hadn’t considered what I would do if I found the dog. Talk to him, I suppose. Tell him he wasn’t alone. The lane rounded a corner and opened onto a clearing where I encountered not a dog but a group of men, too far away to have noticed my intrusion. No, not too far away, but too intent on whatever was squirming at their feet. They were lit from above by a security lamp rigged up to a garage.
One of the men spoke, and the dog stepped up his howling. A dogfight, was my first reaction. Another of the men nudged the creature on the ground with the toe of his boot, and the creature raised its hands in defence. Not a pit-bull terrier, but a boy, no wait, a man, a thin scrawny man, head shaved. He was on his knees, wheedling ingratiatingly though they hadn’t started on him yet. Merciful Jesus, it was Giz.
‘Wa-aa-aa,’ he was saying, palms upturned in supplication. The men started to laugh. They laughed for a good while at his distress, then Giz, the poor bastard, tried to join in. This brought abrupt silence. Even the dog stopped howling to listen.
One of the men said something, to which Giz shook his head in vigorous denial. The man kicked him. His foot caught Giz under the chin, snapping back his neck. That was the signal. The circle of men crumpled as if the ground had sucked them down on top of Giz. His screams were indescribable. I started to run, not to his rescue, but away from him, out of there, back to where I’d come from.
The first phone box had no dial tone. The cash lock had been jemmied open, ‘Giz woz ere’ scratched into the metal casing. The second phone box had no receiver at all. By the time I reached the third one, I knew there was no point in running any more. Whatever had been done to Giz was over with. I reported what I’d seen to the Guards.
I thought I’d never lay eyes on him again, and I wish I hadn’t. I opened the front door the next day to find him huddled on the doorstep, his arm crooked protectively under his chin like a broken wing. There was a pouch of purple blood beneath his eye. His lip was torn, teeth were missing, matted black clots studded his scalp. I didn’t look too closely. People on the street hurried past him. They’d been hurrying past him all morning.
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